How to take better pictures with your mobile?

You don’t really need to invest in a very expensive camera to take great pictures! Here are my top tips on how to take better pictures with your mobile.

I want to start my article with a quote by American Photographer Chase Jarvis. “the best camera is the one that’s with you”

Photographers (including myself) love to upgrade gear as much as they can. Buying a lens which is sharper, with a wider aperture, lighter, longer reach etc. But usually, professional camera equipment is heavier than compact or mirrorless cameras. Nowadays there are even full frame mirrorless cameras which are lighter than most of the DSLR’s. No surprises here they are rather expensive.

So, what we want is a lightweight camera, which takes good enough pictures and not too expensive! it sounds like our mobile phone camera would do the job if we know what we are doing and what we expect from it. Nowadays mobile phone cameras are extremely capable. Especially a lot of Apple iPhone and some high-end Android phones take fantastic pictures.

The composition is the key I love to see National Geographic photographers posting pictures taken by their mobiles. They never cease to amaze me indeed. At the end of the day, we need to remember camera is just a tool to capture what we see and helping us to tell our stories.

Get closer Mobile phone cameras take very good macro shots. If you want to capture a flower or a subject you are at the right place. Don’t think it will not be good enough quality. They let you get closer to subjects more than our expensive lenses unless you have a macro lens.

Mobile cameras are fast My favorite street photography tool is my iPhone. It is small, fast, invisible and always with me. You can frame and take your shot in less than a second. No camera can do that unless you are using like f11 and pre-focus!

Don’t zoom, don’t add a filter and don’t add fake blur Mobile phone cameras are great but it is good not to expect miracles. When you zoom you will have a horrible picture quality. It is a better idea to crop if you need closer pictures. You can edit your pictures instead of adding filters. Filters add too much grain, saturation, and colour to your images. Adjusting shadows, highlights, contrast, and brightness will make your pictures look great.

Why don’t you post your favourite photos taken by your mobile camera below and get my critique!

Which colours look good together? Life is colourful. We see colours every day in nature, we use them while choosing our outfit, painting our houses, are affected by them when buying products, looking at art, photographs, movies.

But which colours actually look good together?

The colour wheel

When white light is bent or refracted by a prism, or by water droplets to create a rainbow, it separates into a continuous gradation of colours. By making these colours into a circle, we get a colour wheel, which artists use as kind of map of the colour universe.

The first thing to notice is that the colour wheel can be sliced in half, separating warm and cool colours. Warm colours often remind us of energy and joy, while cool colours convey calmness and peace.

As we work our way in towards the centre of the wheel, we explore different tones of the same colour. (Any colour that is “greyed down” is considered a tone.) A mixture of tones can be used to convey complexity, subtlety, sophistication.

What the wheel misses is the addition of black and white:

Tints are colours with white added. Using a variety of tints often conveys a soft, youthful and soothing effect.
A shade is any colour with black added. Shades can be deep, powerful and mysterious.

It can be fun to play around with tones, tints and shades of the same colour. If you want to involve more colours, here are a few more ideas to match colours, based on the colour wheel.

Complementary colours are any two colours opposite each other on the wheel. (For example, blue and orange.) Such combinations create high contrast, so are best used when you want something to stand out. You might like to try one of the colours as the main background (or main part of your outfit) and add small accents of the other colour. You might also like to play around with different shades and tints of both of these colours.

Split complementary colours use three colours. The scheme takes one colour and matches it with the two colours adjacent to its complementary colour. (For example, blue, yellow-orange and red-orange.) This is often a nice scheme to use because there is a good contrast of colours, without the clash of the complementary colour.

Analogous colours are any three colours next to each other on the wheel. (For example, orange, yellow-orange, and yellow.) Try to focus on tints of analogous colours and avoid combining warm and cool colours in this scheme.

Triadic colours are any three colours that are equally apart on the colour wheel. For example, red, yellow and blue. The triadic scheme is high-contrast, but slightly more balanced than direct complementary colours. With this scheme, and schemes involving, even more, colours, it is best to let one colour dominate, and just have small accents of the other colours dotted around.

Choosing colours

You may already have a sense of the colours you want to use, depending on your mood, or the emotion you would like to convey. For example, you might pick bright colours if you’re feeling cheerful, or darker ones if you’re feeling sad. Or perhaps you might like to play around with the colour wheel or find inspiration in nature.

Most of all, when choosing colours, try not to overthink it. Just wear and surround yourself with the colours that you like.